


Exit Visas

by staranise



Category: NCIS: Los Angeles, Stargate - All Series
Genre: Gen, Mary Sue, POV Outsider, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rehabilitation, Snipers, someone new joins the team, that's right I said Mary Sue go fuck yourselves if you think it's a bad thing, the real world is very unkind to women who are good at everything, woobies with guns, young women with perfectionism issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 16:16:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1905552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/staranise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Stargate veteran needs someplace to go when she leaves the military; the Office of Special Projects could use some help in not getting shot at with high-powered rifles.  It's a perfect match.  And anyway, Henrietta Lange has a reputation for rehabilitating lone wolves.</p><p>If you're going to come in from the cold, Los Angeles is a pretty good place to do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Someone said that Mary Sue stories were intrinsically bad and boring, and I said: _Challenge accepted._

Melissa Raez is out on her ass again, but even a screw-up like her still has some friends left in the Pentagon and DHS. She's still—what had her recruiter called her? "A valuable young woman." Right. There are still people who'll help ease her way, as embarrassing as it is, when she starts flunking out of her requalifying examinations.

After all, she lasted a year in the Stargate program, which is, they remind her, the bar-none _most_ difficult posting the Air Force has to offer (as well as one of its most secret). Her old CO gives her a pep-talk about it. She never did like him; it's possible that she might've passed her quals if she had. If she'd liked him, she might have tried a little harder; if she'd really wanted to stay with her unit, she might have found something under bone-deep exhaustion to keep her going when her hands and mind were going numb. They'd done incredible things together by any objective measure, and maybe that would have mattered if she could have trusted any of them. If she could have cared.

"You're going to be hard to replace," he says, and that much is true. She's _valuable_. Her mind is a latticework of scars, but they're useful scars; what she keeps in that forest of razors is more knowledge about the Stargate than any Earth-born human is usually ever granted. She's been through the Stargate to planets beyond, and travelled through the stars, and speaks alien languages the linguists at Stargate Command have yet to decipher. It's priceless knowledge that only came at the price of everything she used to be.

She used to be Anneliese and was still called Anna when she used to be a little girl with artistic talent and an Air Force daddy on deployment. She was a young woman called Ann when she fucked her future over very badly. Her name's been dwindling ever since then, like the kind of voiceless scream you make when something paralyzes your throat. She's been dead for years now to the life she lived before, since Air Force intelligence and civilian government agencies scrubbed that identity clean and rechristened her something else. Her own family doesn't know she's alive. Her cover name is a lie thinner than smoke; it's Greek for _honeybee_ , which doesn't fit at all.

Ex- _goa'uld_ hosts are valuable, you see. She was conquered once by the parasitic race that ruled the very stars in the sky, although the Stargate program has fought them back. The creature's filaments had infiltrated her brain and spine and nervous system, until nothing she had done was by her own choosing anymore; the parasite walked for her, talked for her, ransacked her memories and gave her its own. A veritable font of information on everything imaginable—armies, weapons, technology, history, and languages; culture and perspective.

So when she survived the delicate operation that removed the creature from her head, Earth and the United States government welcomed her back with avaricious joy. _We'll overlook everything else you've done,_ they said. _All you need to do is work for us._

She'd promised, and she'd tried, and she doesn't mean to betray; but a broken vessel only holds so much water. Despite everyone's high hopes for her, she isn't sure she can push herself much farther. Stargate Command is eager to keep her, rotating her from front-line duty to an intelligence position Earthside. She herself dreams of something ordinary, something easy; maybe, she thinks in her fanciful moments, an assignment with a regular service Air Force wing. A place where they fly planes. The fate of no world in her hands. No distant planets, no alien languages; just earth and wind and sky.

She tells this to her dad's former CO, who flies a desk in Washington and knows exactly where she's been; he rests a hand on her shoulder and says he'll let her know. She leans her cheek against her knee and knows that she's trading on guilt, because Jack knew her when she was a tiny child and watched her grow until he recommended her father for another unit, where he'd died. He knows her mother thinks she's dead. She does it anyway because Jack's a General now, and been with the SGC since the Stargate first opened; when he pulls strings, things _dance._

 _"Work with a civilian agency,_ " he says in a message that reaches her two weeks later. _"If you stay in the Air Force I can't keep them from using you. But I can release you from active duty if you find government work that suits the terms of your agreement."_

And that thing, which she'd signed with shaking fingers days after she'd first been freed and before she'd ever joined the Air Force, had merely said _service with an approved agency or organization committed to national security and planetary defence._

She takes him up on it. The next day, exhausted as usual, she lays down on her bunk a little before lights out and actually falls asleep for twenty minutes, before someone coming in wakes her up, which is the first time she's done so without drugging herself unconscious in half a year.

*

A lot of the civilian postings are just like what she's doing in the Air Force, only against people from her own planet. They swarm her search results like locusts, and any criteria that eliminates them thins her choices out considerably. It would help if she actually had a trade. Right now she's an instrument of war _(reconaissance specialist)_ and two or three lives ago she was doing a studio arts degree.  
  
So after clicking through page after page of listings she is neither interested in or qualified for, she starts playing a game with herself: what's the most ridiculous job out there that still requires Top Secret clearance? The reality of Top Secret is that in government work, it's like the equivalent of, oh, a college diploma: sure it's not something everybody has, but it's not like you need to be a fucking magician to add it to your resume. Born who and where you say you were, weren't raised by some wacky school for terrorists, no massive mental instability, not affiliated with a foreign service or domestic government enemy. That still leaves a lot to the imagination.

 _Food Services Assistant - Inventory_ in mumblesomething, Nebraska, through the Army. Must _assist the Kitchen Supervisor in keeping food supply in a constant state of readiness._ After looking that one over for a catch, she concludes that Top Secret is necessary just to know where your place of work _is_ , not because they're hiding codes in the canned peaches.

 _Fashion Purchaser_ in Los Angeles, courtesy of Naval Criminal Investigative Services. Surprising, given the Navy's tragic addiction to sailor suits and stupid hats. It also requires firearms proficiency, so maybe they figure _dressed to kill_ isn't a metaphor anymore.

 _Early Childhood Educator_ in Langley, Virginia. Has the CIA decided to be a more female-friendly workspace now, so it's providing on-site daycare? Or is it _actually_ raising spies by hatching them in a government lab and training five-year-olds to kill people with a paper clip?

On reflection, she applies for the fashion job in LA. She likes the thought of looking fabulous.

*

"You're going on a sniper course," Jack says, and she takes a minute to make sure her fingers are still properly gripping the phone receiver. She'd hate to drop it. Her orders were to move back Earthside to Stargate Command, but there wasn't actually a position waiting for her, just a place to throw her bags and a phone number to call.

She tries to swallow inaudibly. "Sorry, I'm what?"

"Two sniper courses," he corrects. "Gives you a useful trade. Starts four days from now."

Twisting a finger through the loops of the phone cord she says, "So, did you find something, or—?"

"It'll be fun," is all he says.

*

It's not very fun, and also Jack didn't mention it's a month and three different courses. There's nothing wrong with it; it's the same mix of tedium and challenge as everything else in the Air Force so far. In fact, it's _exactly_ like the long car trips her father told the same lie about when she was a child. It is, at least, in an area where she's adequate. Marksmanship is one of her relative strengths, the physical work and the numbers both. It's one of the quals she didn't flunk. Hail to early training, she thinks. Her stepdad got her into biathalon when she was fifteen, where you pretend you're in the Norwegian army and do target shooting while racing around on cross-country skis; the kind of weird-ass winter sport where you learn to shoot when your hands are freezing and your core's over-hot, heart pounding while you shiver, sweat freezing into ice along your back. Having that for comparison makes the training facilities in Arkansas seem easy by comparison.

So you've got this person with a rifle, and both of them are good at what they do. The rifle can hit targets with sufficient precision and velocity up to a mile away; the person can calculate the distance the bullet will travel, how likely it is to stray inches or feet to either side, how much gravity will make it drop, as well as identifying what is a target and who is the most valuable person to hit. That's all well and good. But somehow you've got to _get_ this person within a mile of what you want shot, so that they have a vantage from which to shoot. They've got to be able to scout terrain and cross it without being spotted. Then—at least in the United States Air Force, though her teachers can't make promises about all other combatants—you want your sniper to be able to come _home_ again. So then once the enemy becomes aware that their commander, communications array, truck, or electrical generator have been shot, you want them not to _find_ the sniper who's within a mile of them.

You can't just be a good shot. You also need stealth. It's a harder part of the course than the precision shooting drills ever could be.

 _I am a rock,_ she thinks, creeping inch by inch underneath the hot Arkansas sun in week three. A stalk of the grass that's glued to her helmet has fallen loose and comes in occasionally to tickle her nose, and even though she knows it doesn't help she keeps blowing ineffectually at it anyway. Her hands are dedicated to dragging her rifle along under her. About fifteen minutes ago a Jeep carrying two of her instructors roared by a hundred feet to her left, and she's paranoically sure that one of them jumped out of it and hid the sound under the Jeep hitting a pothole. He's probably going to materialize next to her and fail her out of the course right now. _You can't see me. I am sagebrush. I am stone._

*

But the job materializes. Correction: the job _opening_ materializes, at the place that advertised for a fashion purchaser. They've hired someone else to shop for clothes but they want her anyway. The packet of documents Jack sends her provides the fictional resume she is said to have submitted to them, and she finds that during her time in the Air Force she has apparently completed a BFA in graphic design by correspondence. She has an interview in California after her course ends.

The Office of Special Projects, the packet also informs her, provides a myriad of forms of support to the Navy's criminal investigations. Its staff of 40-70 people provide material assistance and personnel in the field in a dynamic civilian work environment, while enjoying an easy commute to the nearby Greater Los Angeles area.

Yes. Her recruiting brochure places "easy commute" and "Los Angeles" in the same sentence. She's never even been to Los Angeles, but she's going to keep that piece of paper for _years_ to come if she gets the job, because oh god, even she knows that's rich.

But the thing that sneaks in around the edges over the next week of her course is: she might get a chance to use her art. This is during the course on subterfuge and camoflague, where she constructs a sniper's ghillie suit. It's the kind of thing she could pass a material sculpture class with, as she paints and outfits the coverall to make her look like sedentary pile of rubble and foliage. She's the only one in the class who knows about underpainting and highlights, can make the cloth look like dappled ground even before netting and leaves go on. She goes back to the art after her field trial, after she's had to stalk and shoot her instructors without getting caught on her way back to the rally point. The last few nights there she and the instructor (who has an Associate of Fine Arts, and loves this shit) drink beer in the shop and laboriously paint sheets of canvas to look like a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes. The urban ghillie suit will probably be much more useful in LA, if there's any call for it there.

The painting, and the job prospect in Los Angeles, make her remember that in California they disguised _entire towns_ during the Second World War beneath vast swaths of painted netting, foliage, and mocked up cars and houses. They make her remember her first fake ID, remembers it coming warm out of the laminator; the art students at UCCS began a friendly contest to see whose replica looked the most convincing, and a few of them ended up making a lot of money until they got busted for it when she was 17. She hasn't forged her own documents in--god, years now; now they're made by experts, and Melissa Raez's passport looks practically genuine.

So take it for what it's worth from the people who came out with "easy LA commute" but it's possible there actually will be opportunities for her to use her skills with them, instead of duties that are just full of all the things she fucks up at.

You know. Running. Manipulating goa'uld technology. Speaking fluent Ancient Egyptian. Group tactics. Teamwork. The stuff SG-25 asked of her all the time.

Both her ghillie suits go in her checked bag with her sharp implements and nice toiletries. She boards the flight to LA reading a small booklet of _Tips for Interview Success_ and thinking, _C'mon, desk job._

*

At the airport she blows off her rental car reservation and gets a sedan from one of the seedier-looking kiosks. The attendant warns her repeatedly that the car doesn't have a GPS installed, which she really does need if she's new to Los Angeles. She politely but firmly refuses the upgrade under the appearances of thrift. Then she tucks the keyfob in her purse and eats lunch at the back of an airport bar, making pencil notations on a paper roadmap.

3G had been a new and distant technology that had nothing to do with her the year she was abducted by aliens; her parents lived practically the other side of the mountain from NORAD, but their farm didn't have cellular reception. Her Trust handler had a satellite phone, but she hadn't been granted the privilege. When she came back to Earth people, it hadn't really been to Earth; she's spent more time on offworld bases and away missions than on actual terra firma, and it's hard to get satellite reception when the planet you're on has no satellites. Now, after so much experience estimating how far a radio signal can travel and decrypting messages by hand, something in her enjoys the solidity of paper and certainty of solid objects.

When her flight had landed everyone had pulled out their phones, and for a moment she'd known panic because the air was thick with plaintext transmissions. _We're here, we're here, we've landed._ She misses and suspects she will have to mourn as a thing that is lost the idea of going off the grid, on Earth at least, because even untethered she will show up on the grid as a dark point where the digital cords have been severed.

Or maybe she's just paranoid.

Two different men come up to her table and make hungry-friendly eyes at her, because she looks like an inept tourist. She misses the Air Force, the Stargate program, with an almost physical pang as she holds back her ready stream of profanity and imprecations. It feels like she's forgotten how to communicate without the steady lubrication of the word "fuck", like the continual shit-talking of the military has robbed her of her native tongue. It wouldn't even have been _rude_ to tell another member of SG-25 to fucking well give her a moment of fucking peace and quiet and go back to his own shithole.

Instead she smiles tightly, shakes her head mutely, holds her body stiff and defensive. She's been so long away from civilians that it hits her like a nasty headache when she remembers: _I'm in the gender that's not supposed to defend itself. Fucking fuck._

On her way out to her car she buys earbuds and a pair of sunglasses.

*

Her interview in Los Angeles takes place on the second floor of a restaurant built of butter-yellow stone, on a street shaded by what she thinks are acacias. _Mademoiselle_ Lange apparently has some kind of pull, because she has the private room in the back. When Melissa arrives for their interview at three-pm, the restaurant is empty and closed, but one of the staff is on hand at the front to lead her through the silent forest of white tablecloths and gleaming overturned water glasses. Her firm, certain strides disappear into the carpet's pile.

The handshake she has all ready to go doesn't even get out of the gate, because inside the private room her interlocutor is already sitting at a small round table, and gestures for her to take a chair. Opposite her, Miss Lange has fussily arranged a cup and saucer of tea, a plate of half-eaten dark buttered tea-bread, and a copy of the _Los Angeles Times_ ; as Melissa sits down, she folds the newspaper in half and puts it aside.

This woman is genuinely small. It's not as evident when she's sitting, but the hands that fold the paper are delicate and childlike. She's around sixty. Her face has fallen into the softness and lines of old age, but, Melissa judges, not very far from where it was in her youth. That soft brown hair either has yet to turn grey, or is ingeniously dyed just short of real richness or lustre. She wears reading glasses on a chain and a high-necked charcoal grey pantsuit in slightly slubbed silk, with small touches--her very nice purse, gold-and-ruby brooch, and delicate gold wristwatch on a leather strap--to indicate that she dresses herself with care.  Like the best works of art, she rewards deeper inspection with further depths of interest and meaning.

Melissa was honestly expecting (half-hoping for) something a lot more... official.

Because for an interview like this, one that gets her out of the Stargate program, she plans to impress; but in this situation, she doesn't know what impressive _is_. Even outside of the military, Intelligence people seem to have a real sense of their own importance, which she can flatter. Henrietta Lange's sense of importance is just as real, but much less amenable to manipulation. She's the kind of person they invented the term _gimlet eye_ for.

Melissa learns this when the waiter slides a chair in behind her as she sits.  Miss Lange looks from him to her and asks, "Tea, Anneliese?"

All the bile in her stomach backs up and freezes in ice with the sharp burn of being _made_.  Being named.  Her first instinct on this discovery is to fight her way out, to flee; get the hell away from someone who knows too much, knows the dangerous parts, and out.  But the warning move of shoving her chair back would alert the waiter (if he's part of this) to immobilize her faster than she has the freedom to stand; Miss Lange is armed, and there's no cover except the door ten feet away; and either the front exit or the back would mean threading through a forest of chairs and tables, past staff in dinner preparations, to find the car they already know about or to navigate a strange city on foot.  (In a mostly residential area, the commercial street of which is thinly populated and covered by surveillance cameras.)

On the other hand, it occurs to her, this woman _is_ interviewing her for a job.  The identity she knows is intensely classified, but not impossible knowledge to obtain.  Maybe she knows it for a legitimate reason.

So if she runs she is almost certainly fucked; if she sits, she is perhaps fucked and perhaps okay.  She did not plan to spend this afternoon smeared out on the sidewalk (or the nice dining room carpet) like strawberry jam.

The calculation didn't take long, so only after a moment's pause (deliberation, let's pretend) she says, "Tea would be lovely."

Those eyes bore into her.  They both wait for the waiter to pour the cup and leave.  After a moment, as Ann has moved her tea closer to her side of the table (her fingertips tell her it is already only moderately warm, due to the wait) it occurs to her that she has the option of being proud that her hands aren't shaking.  Not by some act of will; just because she is the kind of person whose responses are very disciplined.  She had to learn to consciously moderate her heartbeat to do the kind of shooting she does.  But it ought to look good in an interview, right?

"Thank you for meeting with me, Ms. Lange" she says. Because why _not_ demonstrate that she hasn't flown to pieces? But underneath the fright and recovery is a small spark of indignation, because throwing her name out like that had been... mean.

"Of course, my dear," the older woman replies. Every word of that stings. If this conversation is carrying a substantial amount of ice under the surface, that sentence is enough to wreck her on. _Whose dear am I, and why would they of course take me in?_ "Call me Hetty. Miss Lange, in extremis.

"The Office of Special Projects," Hetty continues, taking up her tea and leaning back, as though telling a story, "is a central point of resource for NCIS's covert agents. From our operations centre, we equip, support, and supervise agents in the field worldwide. Within the Los Angeles area, we also conduct beginning-to-end investigations of crimes involving military personnel. I have people in South American drug cartels and East African Islamic terrorist organizations, as well as Los Angeles gangs and Marine units. They are," she says, pausing to look down at her cup, wizened lips pursed, "an extraordinary team of people."

At this point Ann has decided she might as well sit back and drink her damn tea.

"This year I've had three investigations stolen out from under my nose by what we're not supposed to call the Department of Homeworld Security. Months, hundred of hours, of work and dedication, up in smoke. Every time one of our cases intersects with a Celia Directive entity, DHS's investigators snap it up." Celia, Ann remembers, is the code name given to people who understand the interstellar scope of of the DHS and SGC's work. She was buried several layers of code names deeper, beneath the Indigo Program, under the aegis of Operation Stronghold. "We will by no means _replace_ DHS investigative services, but so long as I can achieve a sufficient number of staff cleared for Celia Directive-level information, I am told at least one of my investigations this spring might have been salvaged.

"So then Jack O'Neill told me not too long ago that he observes my people have been shot at too frequently from rooftops with high-powered rifles, and I might be in need of a counter-sniper." She has put her cup down, and interlaces her fingers, fixing Ann with her gimlet stare. "He tells me you're the person I want."

Ann thinks it over, finishing her cup of tea. No, this is nothing like the interview she had half-imagined. It's not innocent or beyond the scope of everyone she's been, and it's nothing to do with fashion or art. She's not about to leave, though. This is all interesting information, an interesting proposal. (Challenge?) Hetty needs (or wants her to get the impression that she needs) her more than she needs Hetty. Rather than being an inconvenient asset, to be retained and handled with care in case she is ever useful but largely inconvenient until then, she is being endowed with desirability. Hetty wants her for her clearance, and for her manner with a rifle. No—Hetty wants her to _spot_ the people with rifles. Her job at the OSP, it is insinuated, would be free of very heavy Stargate influence, and killing people is at a minimum. She'll be out of a military environment, living in a glamorous city. And to sweeten the pot, Hetty is suggesting that this job comes with the personal recommendation of Lieutenant General O'Neill—a man Ann has known since childhood, who still slips up sometimes and calls her _Anna_ like her parents called her when she was eight. He personally participated in her debriefing after the goa'uld extraction. When she was in SG-25 she heard the myths about him everywhere; sometimes it feels like the _walls_ of Cheyenne Mountain remember when he commanded SG-1. If she has a fixed point, a North Star, a person she's going to _believe_ in in the world after the war, Uncle Jack is it.

She's going to confirm as much of this as she can through her sources, you understand.

"I know the Celia Directive," she says noncommitally.

Hetty gives her a knowing smile. "If you take the job, you'll be an NCIS employee. I see no reason for the time being for you to undergo all the bother and training involved in being a Special Agent. As it is, you'll live on your own direction in Los Angeles or the surrounding area. I would suggest using Melissa Raez as a public identity, without acknowledged ties to NCIS. I understand that the decision of whether or not to work among your colleagues under your own name is at your personal discretion."

That knowing smile meant _I know I've got you._ The interview has turned into a job offer. She shifts uncomfortably. "Melissa Raez is fine."

"True names have an uncanny power over us," Hetty Lange says thoughtfully. "They tie us not only to who we wish to be, but who it is we cannot help being."

"Is that why you live under yours?" she shoots back before she's able to stop herself.

Hetty smiles sourly. "No," she says. She looks (the perspective gets reinforced again, like the reminder of a frame) old and small, fragility hinted in the precision of her motions. From the gorgeous old purse she draws out a folded slip of paper, and places it on the table. "I cannot expect to be in office on a reliable basis for a next few weeks. Should you need assistance settling in, Miss Nell Jones will be able to assist you in my stead."

She cocks her head, cooling her anger and honestly just curious. "What if I decide not to take your offer?"

"Why, then," Hetty waves a hand in a circle like a regal wave. She is shutting her purse, but not setting it back down on the floor. The interview is over, it seems. "There is still a thriving commerce of commercial transport between the states of California and Colorado, is there not? I have not heard any news of its collapse."

Ah, so they're going to pretend that it's an offer she really can refuse. She catches the geist of the moment and rises a split second after her interviewer. "Ah. Then, thank you very much for meeting with me."

"Thank you, Miss Raez," Hetty says, catching her hand to shake and pressing it with both of hers. "I am _very_ glad to see you alive and well."

 _When did we meet before?_ she wants to ask, not willing to commit to the leverage those questions would give over. _Who did you know me as?_ Before she's swallowed the lump in her throat, the tiny old woman has disappeared among the shining, pristine tables.

After a moment, she remembers to reach over and pick Nell Jones' number up off the table. It's not that she has something against being manipulated, she explains in her mind to the imaginary friend who actually cares. She's been manipulated her entire life, and everyone wants something. And it's not about finding out if she can trust this woman to tell the truth, as much as finding out if there's truth in what she's saying. She is past the point of suspicion and doubt and into another territory, where the wall against your back threatens to be hollow. Melissa just wants to know before she takes this offer on: if she's being played and screwed over, is it going to be by someone who at least deserves the victory?


	2. Chapter 2

Her move to LA means the acquisition of  _stuff_. She arrives with a bag of clothes and a purse of essentials and checks into a hotel like a wisp of smoke, hardly disturbing the countertops. It feels good after so long with a fifty-pound sack, after a year of carrying every imaginable item necessary to her survival and her team's with more on the FRED if they run out. Her second night in town she goes to a 24-hour convenience store just before dawn,  _because she can._

Things accumulate in her hotel room. Maps; shampoo; candy; shoes. She had forgotten  _shoes_. The last pair she'd bought were comfortable boots that mimicked regulation well enough to be worn with her uniform. She can walk to the ends of the earth in them, but they place her a little too precisely as who and what she was. It's a little too easy for someone to look at them, worn and well-maintained as they are, and say:  _You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive._  Her interview shoes pinch, and that plastic faux-leather is never going to relax into something wearable. 

So she finds athletic shoes she can go running in, and canvas shoes she can run to the store with; flip-flops she will probably need at some point, though right now she can't wear them outside because if she needed to run they'd be useless. Two pairs of soft leather work pumps, and heeled sandals. In the mess of shoeboxes and little wads of tissue paper, she acquires bandages to smooth over blisters and ointment to keep her heels from cracking. Until she has the lay of the land more, her clothing purchases are conservative--almost austere. Her car goes a little beyond that, since she didn't  _need_  to get a dumpy grey Geo Metro with an amateur paint job over rust spots around the wheel wells, but by then the acquisition of  _stuff_  has begun to exhaust her. She chooses her apartment location with maps, a choice she later regrets; before signing a six-month lease, she ought to have thought less about her commute and more about her neighbours.

*

The distance between her apartment and the Office of Special Projects is carefully calculated to have several different routes. Mundanely, this gives her options if there's a traffic accident, but the other result is that she can rotate through several different morning routines every day. Her OSP contact actually recommends this tactic to her; as she gets more active in the field, the greater the chance that someone will try to tail her, and the office is at a classified location.

She didn't intend to lean as much on her OSP contact as she has, but Nell Jones is good people. She's young and short and ferociously intelligent. She's also a little white redhead who's aggressively frumpy in a way that means she actually selects her clothes with a very keen eye and then mixes them into an intriguing, if occasionally visually repellent, professional office style. The first time they meet Nell has matched a cotton sundress in vivid aqua with a slightly fuzzy salmon cardigan and white leather sandals, and Melissa is impressed by the way peoples' eyes just skate right off her.

It's kind of the same thing when they enter the dingy storefront of a copy shop that's the only business left alive in an old industrial block and pass through into the Office of Special Projects. This, Nell explains, is one of the staff entrances; the office takes up the entire warehouse, which is a long, surprisingly lovely Spanish Mission-style building inside. After years of concrete and corrugated tin the arches of sandstone and sun-drenched interior courtyard, the tall windows and airy whorls of wrought iron in the workspace dividers, feel like a revelation. She did not expect a Level 3 Secured Environment to look so graceful. The sunlight and shelter speak of peace, the relative luxury of being able to craft a space to look a certain way just because you can. A planet left to its own devices long enough to thrive.

She gawks as she trails Nell, who carries the weight of the conversation. Some staff walk or bus, she's explaining, and come in the boring front entry; the majority leave their cars in the semi-secluded parking to the side and use an anonymous door set into the wall. Around the back end, which is mostly kept clear for the loading dock, the Operations special agents tuck their cars and come straight in the back entrance.

So they pass by offices and workshops, which through loops of iron contain people at computers and someone putting lettering on a giant green road sign, mannequins ballistic and sartorial, and the intermittent chatter of several different languages.

"So the workspaces here are all Level 2," Nell says, as they reach the end of the long room. "The entire building is NCIS personnel only, with additional clearance from the Director. We have a Level 1 building offsite that we use for things like interrogation. And this—" she presses a keycard next to the glass-paned door, "is Ops, which is Level 3, cleared personnel only."

Melissa hesitates as Nell shoves the door open and holds it out for her to take. "Do I need to scan in too?"

"Hm?" Nell looks over her shoulder as she steps into the sandstone arcade. "No, I got you. I'll give you all your keys and passes today after we've sworn you in. So over here there's a staircase to Ops itself, which is where I am most of the time. Hetty's below us." Nell's arm describes, apparently, that one goes up the staircase to their left, along the walkway directly over the arcade, and into the shuttered upper room to their right. Sun comes in from their left, and at this hour of stretches more than halfway across the floor. It stops short of Hetty's office, which, though recessed under the arcade that lines the room, has no real barriers to entry from here. She catches an impression of a Persian rug over a terra cotta tiled floor, an old wooden desk and a wall full of frames, before she moves on to the rest of the room; the racks of clothes and fitting room in the corner, and the banks of desks on the sunward side. In contrast to the busy hum of the offices, Ops is quiet and empty. "This area is Agent Callen's team, and anyone we have rotated in. The field agents spend most of their time here"

"Doesn't it mess with your logs?" Melissa asks.

Nell takes a moment to fail to connect the question to any part of her tour lecture. "What?"

"Multiple people using one swipe-in when moving between classified areas." Her shoulders shrug under Nell's slightly puzzled expression. "I come from... a place where they were really anal about that kind of thing." _Because,_ she does not say, _Any of us could turn on the group in the blink of an eye, and if you'll relax the rules for a friend, you can't help relaxing them for an enemy._ Goa'uld, double agent, za'tarc, clone...

Nell gets it, but doesn't seem concerned. "Oh, we have our own ways of taking care of things."

"Surveillance, surveillance, surveillance?" she suggests, trying to make it like a joke.

"Well," Nell considers, "I was going to say 'trust' and 'knowing each other'. But I'm pretty sure we're up on the surveillance too."

It's not disapproval, but it's not joking either. It's just fact. So Melissa just shuts her mouth on any more paranoid questions and keeps up with the tour. The door on the other end of the Ops room is an open arch with beautiful blue-tiled fountain set into the far wall. They have the choice of turning right or left.  

"We've got your SCIF down in our Level 4 documents room down that way," Nell says, pointing to their right. "That's where you can access Celia Directive stuff. We had to rearrange some stuff and it's harder to fit a comfortable chair in anymore, but they said your only other option was driving down to Point Mugu every time you want to download a file. Very Cold War." They, meanwhile, have proceeded left. The hallway enters into a more prosaic-looking gym where punching bags jockey for space with exercise machines and the wall behind the single basketball hoop is a two-storey plywood climbing wall.

Is there a kitchen? She thinks as they cross the room. Because these people are looking kind of like a self-contained little universe. They look ready for a siege. But if she makes one more comment like that it's going to go down on a report somewhere— _Spent orientation repeatedly commenting on facility's defensive capabilities_ —so she says, though it feels awkward, "Nice space."

Nell smiles back at her, giving the gym a considering glance. "I've got to work on my climbing. I forget this stuff is here sometimes." Then she passcards through the far door and holds it open.

The armory, when they reach it a few doors later, is impressive, and contains an entrance to a 25-yard ballistics range. This part of the building feels different, with little of the Spanish Mission grace. The gym is cinderblock and concrete, and this room is concrete and stainless steel. Nell unlocks additional cabinets in the wall before pulling out the trays she's looking for.

Some of the items are on display behind locked grilles. Melissa, looking around as Nell fusses, can see that though there are no firearms visible, it's still an impressive collection. Three different kinds of archery equipment: a sleek black crossbow (modern, lightweight, and practically noiseless); its big brother, a compound recurve with stabilizers and bow cables, optimized for accuracy; and an exceptionally long bamboo bow, which is traditional Japanese. Even though a two-metre bow doesn't fit the tiny woman, the artistic flair and attention to detail reeks of Hetty. This is an armory with style, which has not discarded the things of the past.

She wishes she knew enough about swords to decipher the next case, which is full of live blades.

"Here," Nell says. She's opened a case full of more ordinary racks of firearms, and the table has a few pieces of Melissa's trade on it. Melissa takes her nervous smile as invitation to look them over. Aside from the handheld rangefinder and scope (temporarily unmoored from a rifle), there's a black, slightly scuffed-looking digital Canon with a modest zoom lens. Her primary job as a counter-sniper is surveillance and detection, so it's no surprise that those are the items she's being issued.

"Since you're going with the photography persona," Nell says, "We were able to get gizmos that fit your cover. Your camera's fitted with the same kind of technology as the scope and your rangefinder." She picks up the camera, which wakes up and whirrs out when she turns it on. Holding it out for Melissa to see, she demonstrates pulling the lens out slightly and twisting, but instead of adjusting the aperture or the focus rings, it's one that's entirely unmarked.

On the display something clicks over, and Melissa's looking at the table of gear in a display that's not saying anything about the lighting or the battery, but _is_ saying _54° 0.23m_. Which changes as Nell swings the camera up, tracking to _78° 2.58m_ before she hands it over. "The camera's a rangefinder?"

"It measures distances of up to three thousand metres," Nell tells her, which makes Melissa's eyebrows draw in with _Shit, really?_ "Unlike your typical laser rangefinder, this doesn't actually _emit_ anything... optical. And if you move it—" she gestures, and Melissa complies by twisting the blank lens ring over again, "—it measures everything in heat signatures too. All on that lens. If you turn it back all the way over the other way, it just has the usual options, though."

Mostly what Ann remembers from photography class is always changing the fucking lens, trying a million f-stops before she gets it right. This camera looks like it's for a fairly serious photographer (though not a rich one), one who cares about doing it herself instead of letting autofocus do everything. But apparently down in its guts, it's nothing like a regular camera at all, because cameras don't work that way.

"How common is it? I mean, just, a rangefinder in general that doesn't use lasers. One of the new ones." The laser rangefinder is normally how you _spot_ snipers, if they'll use one; the beam that measures distance emits a sometimes-visible flash. Not too common in urban areas anyway, but she worries about losing whatever edge she has.

"They did testing with the prototypes last year, and they're introducing the new models with the Marines right now," Nell says. "The Navy's had the technology for about a year before that. They developed it."

"So nobody other than the US," she confirms. _Banner year for military R &D_. _Beginning of a banner decade._ Because she's going to bet anything you can name her that the thing she's holding in her hands has ideas that didn't originate on planet Earth. They don't emit anything optical, oh no; but most likely they, like practically every other person and thing related to the Stargate program (Melissa Raez included) are tagged with a small piece of a naquadah isotope that makes them visible from space if you know how to look.

Nell hedges. "So far as we know." Because this woman's an intelligence analyst, and therefore knows better than to say _no_. As they go over storage and handling protocols, Nell also teaches her each device's failsafe; with a ballpoint pen and a sturdy shoe-heel, she can render each of them completely nonfunctional before letting them fall into enemy hands.

There are a few rifles in the firearms locker, mostly intended for tactical assault teams; only two of them are suited for long-distance marksmanship.

One of them, she recognizes as a variant on the Remy she trained on. Shorter barrel, light tactical, easier to get around, its range probably closer to six or seven hundred metres than the eight or nine her instructors had been pushing for. And the other...

"Zastava is a Serbian weapons manufacturer," Nell recites. "The M93 was developed for extremely distant targets, and is effective up to over a mile..."

"It's an anti-tank rifle," Melissa murmurs, tracing the bolt with her fingertips.

Nell coughs apologetically. "Not quite. This model is intended for standard NATO .50 calibre, which has slightly less armor-piercing capability than the Russian NSV ammunition."

Melissa's mouth quirks. "Something of a compromise. Might as well _not_ use ammunition that kind of screams, 'From Russia, with love.' Fifty-cal's probably easier to come by in Los Angeles. How _did_ you guys come around to using a Serbian rifle, anyway?"

"That's a question for Hetty," Nell says carefully. "The M93 will be pretty much yours unless we find somebody else with sniper experience. Special Agent Blye has been using this one for shots of under 500 yards." She pats the Remington gingerly.

"Are you much of a gun person?" Melissa asks. Nell talks about the rifle specs as though she's got to be very careful to keep all the information in her head straight, but she's better off-script than you'd expect.

Nell shrugs, looking at the guns. "When I have to be. I'm less of a rifle person." She's also maybe five-two, short enough that she comes up to Melissa's shoulder; the type of girl people probably always tell isn't big enough for anything more than a .22. It would be easy to rest her chin on the top of Nell's head if she wanted, but instead of looking up at her all the time, Nell's looking down. She is also, Melissa notices, consistently dodging questions; now she changes the topic again. "When it comes to practice for you, we've got you range access up at Pendleton whenever their schedule's clear. First they just want you to come in and do some training and certification, especially with the new optical technology. They've got an expert onsite, since some of the Marine units there are breaking it in."

"What's your favourite colour?" is out of her mouth before she can think twice about it.

Nell gawks at her. "Excuse me?"

"What's your favourite thing about LA? Do you follow any sports teams?" Melissa raises her shoulders and lets them drop, hoping this comes off as imploring, not deeply weird. "I mean, not that the technical stuff isn't important. But I'm new here, and I don't know anyone, and I'm actually secretly really bad with social skills. I can read the user's manual, but I don't actually know what I'm doing here."

What she can _see_ , in that moment, is a layer of prickly defensiveness melting from Nell Jones's shoulders. This is a smart, a _very_ smart woman, who's just had another very smart woman dropped on her head; one who's got a foot on her, a special security clearance, and a much more martial skillset. So what goes out of Nell's spine is the defiant determination to prove she's _just as good_ , replaced somewhat by the knowledge that she already is.

Melissa likes that.

*

Her apartment unit is in the middle of a long row of townhouses. The stucco facades are jammed together in a way that reminds her of nearly every home she's moved between, base to base to base. The rows of houses stare at each other across a stretch of crispy yellow grass and she's assigned a spot in one of the three small parking lots at the back, with repeated warnings that guests can't stay for more than a week.The individual units are as bland and interchangeable as the separate developments, every American city like every other and only a little different than the postwar-construction flat in Germany when she was seven. Her mother had kept an album with pictures of every place they'd ever frugally squeezed themselves into and out of when her father had been alive, and she can only remember two of them that hadn't looked like this. For a year in Illnois, they'd had the novelty of a completely detached crackerbox house; two weeks in Florida, they'd lived out of boxes in a cramped apartment until something better came open. It's familiar enough, like a Quonset hut is now, for her to be indifferent. Rather than wrangle furniture, she'd rented semi-furnished.

The apartment is simple, bedroom-bathroom up, living room-kitchen-half-bath down. She'd looked it over in the noonday heat before deciding to rent, and picked up keys three days later around three in the afternoon. None of the tall buildings in the area have a good sight-line on her back door, and the complex offers very little shelter for a tactical assault. Paying closer attention didn't seem important. The place looked reasonable, the location was right, Nell had made approving noises about the crime rates over the phone; beyond that, Los Angeles is still a sweltering, bewildering cacophony of people and place, so it's not like she really had any other criteria to judge it on.

Before signing the lease she and her super walk the suite over for her in/out report, mutually agreeing that the couch has been clawed at some point by a cat and there's a crescent of a scorch mark on the formica countertop in the kitchen. When they leave the unit through the kitchen her shadow-draped backyard has a tablecloth's worth of grass that's doing a little better than in the front, and a planter full of weed stumps and white gravel. One the far side of her right-hand neighbour she can see a small head of light-brown hair at waist height through the gaps in the fence; a playing child. When they turn left she sees lawn chairs on the rear balcony closest to the parking lot. The guys occupying two of the chairs glance her way, and she flicks her gaze out to her car.

When she passes them, her super walking right beside her, she doesn't hear anything but the crack of an aluminum can being opened.

So the day after that she checks out of her hotel and moves in by simple expedient of dropping her luggage on the floor, then goes out collecting housewares until evening. More stuff. Sheets; towels; cereal and milk; four cups, six forks. It feels like too much, but by now she feels worn down and tired by attempts not to buy more than she needs. It's a battle the shopping centres of Los Angeles seem determined to make difficult. Nobody watches her when she makes trips back and forth from her car at the end of the night.

The next day she goes back to the Office of Special Projects, swiping in with her own card and typing her own passcode into the weapons locker. Henrietta Lange is there today, with a badge in a slim leather case and her picture inside it. She swears an oath, not for the first time, to the country that claimed her by birth and the principles on which it stands. Like she did last time, she feels light as she says the words, like she's permeable and the meaning whistles through her like the wind. She means it, inasmuch as she sees no value in betraying that oath on behalf of any _other_ country or system of government. After only a little reflection, she agreed to renounce her right to German citizenship the first time she took this oath and joined the Air Force. She did it because of the two countries she is the daughter of, this one has starships and an active offworld presence. She doesn't care about Terran governments nearly so much as she cares about holding the line when the rest of the galaxy comes to call. It's just a fierce and lonely loyalty back on the planet that thinks it's alone, that cares so deeply about fighting among itself. (It has nothing else to fight with.) The place in her that might have believed in America seems to have died, if only of drought. But it seems to work for other people, so why not for her? She'll keep dumping water and oaths on it and let somebody stick a flag in the mud. Maybe it'll grow back.

*

Her job description includes clocking a minimum of eight hours' range time every week. Pendleton can actually give her twelve, if she's willing to come by first thing in the morning, so the OSP allots her twenty to acknowledge the drive out and agrees to pay for her gas. Nell apologizes for not realizing just _how_ much a part of her week this is going to be, since the trip clocks a lot of time on the Interstate, but Melissa figures: she's still pretty close to the OSP itself, she's going against the flow of traffic at non-peak rush hour times, and she's just signed a six-month lease, so she can cope. Nell apologizes again anyway, which makes more sense once she's gotten better acquainted with LA traffic, but in the end her Pendleton days sustain her.

The first time she drives out, at the 0530 they told her with the Remy in the back of her Geo, the range actually isn't open yet. She sets the rifle down beside her and leans against a wall, reflecting that LA's climate is actually kind of nice this early in the morning, when the night is still warm but there's a sweet dampness the sun's gonna burn off when it rises. The Marine on security detail, who was really dubious at her repeated assurances that 0530 was what she'd been told, trudged off to see if somebody had the keys. Apparently, though, she intercepted one of the sniper school instructors on the way, because that's who comes jogging by in his exercise gear to say, "You're here to shoot?"

"Agent Melissa Raez, NCIS," she identifies herself, and they identify that 1. He knew (vaguely) of her coming; 2. She has been punked; 3. The range opens at 0700; 4. He is not the one who punked her; 5. She is invited to come for a cup of coffee in the meantime. They lock up her rifle and head down, where she actually gets coffee _and_ a bowl of hot cereal, as the commander of the sniper school shows up. She recognizes him,and the slightly jagged scar has over one eyebrow that is rather more healed than she last saw it and _has_ to draw Harry Potter comparisons. If he did suffer a traumatic brain injury from the incident it hasn't kept him from being rotated back Earthside into a really nice position. When she comments that it's nice to see that he's alive, since she lost track of him after his men carried him back into the warehouse, he gets it out of her that she was in one of the units that oversaw the evacuation. They exchange enough detail to ensure that they're referring to the same incident and both avoid mentioning their base had been attacked by aliens on another planet at the time. He invites her to breakfast with his staff, snarks out the guy who punked her, and manages to convey the general wink-wink-nudge-nudge that means she's all-right people. After that, Camp Pendleton's resistance to a civilian sniper on the range melts away.   It... makes her feel slightly less awful about the ugly mess that entire episode had been.

So from 0700 to 1055 she and anyone else who has range access get in there and practice. She'd anticipated some kind of friction her first day out so she doesn't have her new scope or the computer tablet that will calculate her range card for her, because she's not letting them see her fumble with something new right now. Instead it's just three hours of good, clean shooting. She takes breaks occasionally to let her rifle cool down and go through a couple of yoga poses, but since during one of them her Colonel-who-lived shows up to see how she's doing, nobody does more than look curiously, including the students who take over the range at 1100 hours.

To be honest, she and Colonel Potter never become great friends. She spends a lot of time ghosting in and out of the range, since somebody has to catch her early and escort her in to the dining facilities if she wants a cup of coffee. Whether it's because she's civilian or because there's a slight chill between active-duty people and NCIS, or just because they think she's aloof, most people don't bother her. The instructors do invite her along on a friendly field game between courses, and she accepts being soundly beaten with good grace and preserves some NCIS honour around the bonfire that night during a drinking game that involves cans of beer, 9-millimeter pistols, and even more beer.

The Pendleton days give her week a backbone of highway and a range of hills. Her rifle, over and over, gives them a heartbeat. She wonders, more than once, if this drive wasn't _designed_ to give her a regular escape, to keep sending her out of the bright hot city and away from the crush of the OSP's team, to nestle her in a military camp and cradle a rifle against her cheek and make sure she has the silence that her soul hungers for. Because if it was, she has to say, that person was pretty smart.

*

She meets the field agents before she's settled into her routine. After two Pendleton days with the smaller rifle, she's willing to take the M93 out and give it a spin. She takes it out in the late afternoon, fumbling slightly with the armory's system of locks and catches. She doesn't want to keep it overnight, but neither does she want to drop by in the morning and spend forever putting her kit together, so she'll assemble her bag tonight and leave it in one of the lockers. It's all a bit unfamiliar, but she pushes herself through that prickly need to be perfect and searches three different drawers before finding the .50 ammunition to take with her tomorrow. _It's not a race. Just go through it slowly._    For completeness she strips and cleans the rifle, letting each piece imprint itself on her memory.

She's aware that the armory is not a private room, so she's not unduly alarmed when movement through the glass of the door lets her know that someone's coming through. The room is so soundproofed, the agents' conversation goes from a barely-audible buzz to an animated tumble of words with a turn of the knob. A woman's voice, following a snort of laughter, says, "—Right, as if you _ever_ would."

"That," says the guy opening the door, who looks back at his companion, "is unfair. Un. Fair. I am _excellent_ at suave." Though he isn't suave so much as an overgrown teenager; his holster and the gleam of a golden shield hang from a belt around a pair of acid-washed jeans, and his hair is a shaggy mop of blond curls.

The woman saunters in after him, and as they make eye contact Melissa can feel the bubble of a private conversation pop, though there's not a change in the smile on the woman's face. She just comes in, becomes aware of the room, includes Melissa, and breaks her energy from what was going on before. "Hi," she says, with frank, friendly curiosity. She's also in jeans and a casual shirt, though unlike his tee, hers has a buttoned collar and its sleeves go to her elbow. The waves of her dark hair are pulled back from her face with a clip. She's kind of heartbreakingly lovely. "I don't think I know you."

"Melissa Raez," she supplies. Then she fills in the information everyone here wants next, capacity and duration. "I'm a new agent. I've only been here a couple days."

Special-Agent-Kensi-Blye introduces herself and her partner, Detective Marty Deeks. Melissa raises an eyebrow because she didn't think NCIS _had_ Detectives, but after a short wave and a "Hi", the guy goes back to ogling the Zastava on the table. "She's got a big gun, Kensi," he says to the Remington's other user. "Why don't you ever use a gun that big?" After Melissa's experience with Nell that was kind of the _last_ thing she wanted brought to Special Agent Blye's attention, but, leaving her out of it, the woman just leans her body over far enough to smack him up the back of the head. He protests, loudly, and glares at her through his curls. "I was just _asking._ "

"Okay," Melissa says quickly, raising her hands palms out to show that she's innocent. "I did not give consent as a bystander for this."

Detective Deeks _grins_ at her, a wide-toothed dimpled thing that implies that yeah, he knows what bystander consent is, and his mind just went there too. Special Agent Blye smiles, sweet as sugar.

"None of us did." Two more agents have come in behind them, but the two already in the armory barely twitch. Familiar, then. The first impression of the two men that Melissa gets is _the cavalry;_ where Deeks and Blye are liveliness and colour, these two are solid, muscled presence. The first one seems like he heard an opening to make a smart remark and took it without hesitation, and now that he's done, he's checking out the situation with bright, curious eyes that are at odds with his sardonic expression and closed-off posture. He goes to the other bench without missing a beat, unholsters his gun and drops its clip by sense-memory. _His_ partner is even taller and broader, and comes into the room with something of _I despair of the whole lot of you_ in his face, before seeing Melissa shifts him to something more friendly. He seems to have a moment of recognition, if only _oh yeah, we were getting someone new in._

"Sam," he says, dispensing with the traditional NCIS mouthful of title-name and offering her a hand. She shakes with a brief, sturdy clasp. His muscular hand doesn't offer her the kind of crushing challenge some men his size like to offer, so she doesn't have to squeeze back. She still feels dwarfed, and like she doesn't know how large to be; too small to threaten, tall enough to be respected, not arrogant enough to be a target. Head down, chin up. _Smile._

"Miss Raez," Hetty says from the door, "has elected to launch her civilian career with NCIS as our counter-sniper."

"As opposed to an actual sniper?" Detective Deeks asks, though it's probably only intended for his partner, since she waves a hand and he shushes.

Serenely, impervious to the awkwardness Melissa's feeling in the room, Hetty continues, with appropriate hand gestures beginning with the drive-by smartass, "My head agent, G Callen; and these are Special Agents Sam Hanna, his partner; and Special Agent Kensi Blye, with her partner, Detective Deeks. These are the rest of our home Ops team."

"Yeah, we just—" Melissa makes a hand gesture at the first two she met, hoping to intimate 'we introduced ourselves.' Their names are pretty unwieldy, though, and it's possible calling them by title-surname would be more of a mistake than not, though right now the only person whose name she has permission to use is Sam. Too bad. She turns to properly greet Sam and SA Callen, who waves with his clip still clasped in his hand. There's a brief twitch of something that might be a smile in his face, but he's mostly intent on what he's doing on the workbench. "Hi," she says.

Sam has perked up with interest. "Military? What branch?"

"Air Force," she explains briefly.

He nods in reaction, his hands clasped behind his back. With too-somber brown eyes he says, "I'm sorry."

It takes her a split second to parse that, the condolence-cum-insult. (He's probably Navy.) The flash of affront pulls an inch up out of her spine, until she takes up more space than she's physically inhabiting. Because she expected that kind of crap from Pendleton; but instead Pendleton reminded her that beyond her lifelong Air Force loyalty, she was a Stargate veteran from a mixed unit. This wasn't the kind of stuff you even permitted with shit-slinging, that wasn't allowed to escalate into a fight worth having, because one, the Air Force has bled more out there than any other branch since the Stargate opened, and fielded some fucking _brilliant_ people; and two, they can't afford that kind of petty divisiveness outside of sporting events, and it is _beneath them._ So for a Stargate veteran, she gives that the only kind of frosty, iron-spined reply it deserves. "That was rude."

It hangs in the air between them, to see if she'll take it back. She doesn't.

He shifts his posture just a little, then backs down and concedes her point. "It was. My apologies."

She nods immediately. "No problem." He smiles. She flickers one back.   Hetty almost looks... approving. Melissa wants to draw in a big, steadying breath, but discipline keeps her looking unperturbed now that the moment of conflict is over. She hadn't meant to antagonize anyone, but she'd just been so off-balance... (Deeks and Blye don't look bothered; Callen might be a little squinty? It might not have been so bad.)

"Miss Raez will provide surveillance and detection against long-range threats when you are in the field," Hetty continues, her dry voice refusing to comment on what just happened. "I encourage you to consult her as a resource when choosing locations or setting up tactical plans, and anticipate her presence in your area of operations. A counter-sniper, Mr. Deeks, _is_ a sniper, who specializes in the detection and neutralization of other long-range marksmen. Miss Raez will acquire other duties as time progresses. Her desk is with the support staff."

Hetty's head agent breaks the tableau they seem to have formed by picking up his gun and clip and carrying them over to the far case. For whatever they were all out doing, they used separate clips, and—yes, there are more firearms on the benches than there are people, so at least three of them were carrying double. Sam is sorting out his weapons fastidiously, while the other two were both dawdling over their work and, she gets the suspicion, shooting each other speaking glances when nobody else was looking. But SA Callen—she hadn't caught his first name correctly—seems to have stuff to do, because when his weapons are stowed he makes a pointing gesture out the door and says to Hetty, "I'm going to go make some calls—" and she nods permissively. He collects himself long enough to look back at Melissa and say, "Nice to meet you, Agent Raez," before he's out of there again.

"Nice to meet you too," she says, and does not trail off weakly when he's already far enough away that he can't hear the end of it. The next person for her eye to fall on is Hetty, whose expression is a little bit thoughtful. It's a speaking look in a foreign language so she can't puzzle it out. Then, after a brief look around at everyone, Hetty just gives her the tiniest of nods and slips out again.

Melissa's just looking down at the rifle parts on her bench when someone—do they ever call him Mopsy?—sidles up to her table. Detective Deeks leans over with his hands clasped behind him like a punctilious waiter, examining her rifle with minute interest. She doesn't know quite what to say; his partner, when glanced at nervously, is just watching with amusement. "You," he says earnestly, leaning into her space, "have a _very big_ rifle." Which just about sends her into a fit of nervous goddamn _giggles_ , which she chokes down. "Can I touch it?" he continues.

SA Hanna—Sam—saves her in the moment by pausing at the door. "Sorry, again," he says. "You, uh... welcome, and, good luck."

Which means he sees the position she's in, and dealing with Detective Deeks is on _her._ She smiles and doesn't quite avoid looking pained, and says, "Nice to meet you."

The detective has stayed perfectly still through the brief interlude. Thinking fast, she turns back to him and says, "You can touch it, but the next major felony I commit, I'm leaving your fingerprints at the scene."

" _Yesss!"_ he crows, snatching up the rifle to fondle its barrel and stock. His partner laughs, and Melissa, looking at her, can share a smile. "Make sure it's a _good_ felony," he says, flipping the weapon over. "I don't wanna go to trial except for something impressive."

She and SA Blye gets the exact same thought at the exact same time. "Money laundering," Melissa says.

"Indecent exposure," SA Blye replies.

"Hey!" the detective squawks, but they're too busy grinning at each other to look at him.

"So," Melissa says, "you're a sniper?"

The woman shrugs. "Not really. I'm just a good shot."

"If you see it as a useful distinction," Melissa says, a little dubiously. She never quite believes pretty women who say they're "just" good at something.

"Hey, I hope you don't get the wrong impression with Sam," the agent tells her. "He's, I mean, he was a Navy SEAL, he takes it pretty seriously, but he's not _actually_ , you know... He's a good guy. He doesn't mean it."

"Much," her partner chimes in. He's set the rifle down. "But being from the military at all will earn you points."

Melissa cocks her head at him. "So, does NCIS have detectives?"

"Deeks is our LAPD liaison," Blye explains.

"It's a special... Hetty thing." He nods. "Liaison." He says the word like it's something kind of different, possibly a code.

"Ah," she says, thinking again. "Kind of like the position of counter-sniper is a... special Hetty thing?"

"Operational psychologist," Blye says. "Intelligence analyst. Cryptographer. Personnel positions are at the discretion of the Operations Manager."

"Hunh." That's something for her to chew over; not that her position was specially created, but that Hetty has a history of finding pretexts to recruit the people she wants... but there's not even time to begin the way she wants to, because this isn't the moment to sink deep into thought.

"We're gonna be busy wrapping up this case," Detective Deeks says to her, "but sometime later, you should come out with the team. You new to LA?"

"Yeah," she says, kind of grateful. She's somehow less awkward and off-balance than she had been before they came in. Off-balance feels like a dynamic state, like the people in this place move in a constant swirl, and most things can be covered for by jokes or apologies or explanations. She hasn't got the total measure of the cavalry, but this half of the Ops team seems... kind. More like Nell. "I'm finding my way around, but yeah. I'd like that."

*

Hetty catches her after she's settled in. Between four and six the office empties slowly, by degrees, to prevent the appearance of a mass exodus, and some people stay longer than that. Nell shares 24-hour on call shifts with the main Ops team, while others sit up late to monitor surveillance cameras or pick up the phone when an agent in the field calls. It makes it easy for Melissa to just kind of sit and let people drift out around her, until most of the desks on the non-Ops side are empty.

Hetty likewise drifts out, so quiet and unremarkable that even people who seem to either respect her or worship her as a minor god don't notice when she goes past. She thumbs through racks of shirts, freshly mended or tailored, that are ready to be brought into the Ops staging room, and thoughtfully surveys the work on the cutting table. One of the seamstresses has spent most of the day disassembling an Armani suit, and when she is done the A/V wires, camera, and mic will be invisibly integrated into the seams. Subtle differences in the tailoring allow the agent greater movement and safety: the back vents are elongated, shoulders reshaped. The fabric over the shoulder holster is double-interfaced to prevent creases, and the opposite side is padded to create a symmetrical line. It's beautiful work.

When Melissa said so, she'd ingratiated herself to the materials workshop staff and ended up eating lunch with them. The suit overhaul's main architect, she now knows, spent three weeks studying in Milan last year. She keeps a photograph of herself arm-in-arm with Miucci Prada over her desk. Another had been pressured by her family to go into the Marines instead of working in her father's drycleaning shop; she laughs that after all that, she's happy to be back in Los Angeles and back to mending shirts. They'd nodded thoughtfully when Melissa explained that she'd been told to "make herself useful" when she wasn't needed in the field, and, she thinks, eyed her speculatively as an excellent potential pipeline of gossip out of Ops. Their interactions with the field agents are severely limited since at least half of them submit to fittings only under severe duress from Hetty. The workshop makes do with custom-fitted mannequins made of brown paper and duct tape, and code-named charts that say that _Miss Scarlet_ has a winter complexion and a 36" bust, and _Mr. Happy_ is a blue-eyed brunet with size 10 feet who should never be allowed to dress in green. In the afternoon they stole her and put her to work with one of the assistants, treating sets of blue coveralls with acid to make them look worn. Melissa was happy to be stolen; it made a change from reading procedures manuals and reviewing tactical assault plans.

For a minute Hetty disappears from view. When she straightens up again, she's rescued a pair of dressmaker's shears from under one of the workstations, and hangs it on the pegboard with care. The gesture makes Melissa look down to find that she's patting the manuals on her desk into a neater pile. It's the end of day, with the daylight turning evening gold. Some of the desks out there are left clean and orderly, and others with tasks clearly abandoned when the end of day came. She hates sharing space with other people because of the compulsory tidiness it demands—leaving a messy workstation has always seemed like a promise to herself that she'll pick up the work tomorrow. Other than capping her paint and soaking her brushes, she'd always left everything as it was. Remembering tubes of paint and turpentine hurts a little less than it usually does. The girl she was had painted, and done well by it. It had always felt so natural, like it had always been a part of her. Normally painting reminds her of all the things she's lost since she inherited a war and the Stargate took over her life, but right now it just... doesn't. So much. Mostly she regrets that this workspace isn't really hers, and she has to leave it clean.

So when she stands up with an armful of folders, Hetty looks over and with that gravelly voice she asks, "Going back for more?"

"Just stowing these back in Ops," she says, gesturing to the stack of tactical plans she's carrying.

"Ah." Hetty nods, resurveying the materials workshop with a proprietary eye. "Be careful about the filing."

Melissa turns straight up the staircase when she gets to the Ops side, too awkward to talk to the special agents on the far side of the airy room. The plans are stored in cabinets outside of what the Ops personnel called Ops—what Melissa would have said was the situation room, which is the place in the facility above Level 3 other than the room they keep her SCIF. Nell's already gone, though her workmate is still inside with his back to the door. Melissa ducks by the opening and starts returning the folders to their various cabinet drawers—arranged by year, security level, and investigation codename. These aren't actually the archives; they're just copies of files that might be wanted on short notice.

When she's done, Miss Henrietta Lange is standing next to the cabinets, holding two tumblers of amber liquid. Melissa closes the cabinet drawers until she hears the metal click, then straightens up slowly and takes the glass that's held out to her. Hetty walks past her, to stand on the walkway overlooking the room and holding her drink quietly. After a moment, Melissa joins her. Her glass's contents smell like whisky. She puts her elbows on the railing and watches two of the field agents leave for the day in the middle of a joking argument.

Hetty drinks first. "I started out at a sewing machine," she says then. Melissa tries some of her own; the scotch etches warmth and smoke across her tongue. Hetty looks forward, all very casual. "Got to working in films, as a costumer. It let me travel."

Good cover for a spy, Melissa thinks. She remembers that students for film and theatre were always looking for the weirdest things—a truck stop bathroom to shoot in, or a hundred pairs of baby shoes. The demands of the art transcend the strictures of the ordinary. And then there are always people going in and out, always people with small, important, but outwardly incomprehensible jobs... so many possibilities. It's probably an invitation to ask, to feel admitted into a circle of confidence, but Hetty's life story isn't what she wants to know.

"I started out painting," she says, rolling her tumbler back and forth between her palms. "But then, you knew that."

The last of the Ops field agents has come back from the armory at the end of the day. It's part of why Hetty doesn't respond right away; she just automatically tracks her head agent as he passes through the room below. Melissa's met basically everyone who works in Ops by now, and she's vowed to make herself be on good terms with them. Callen's polite, but reserved, almost as much as Hetty. He's the one who almost never comes in from fittings, the one the seamstresses think should never wear green. Which is funny, because the duffel he lifts off his desk and slings over one shoulder is classic Army olive. It's probably an aesthetic thing, to do with how little green accentuates his (very blue) eyes, and he probably doesn't care.

"Good night, Hetty," he calls, turning to his Operations Manager without seeming to even need to look for her. He does miss a beat to see Melissa up there beside her, drinking old scotch, but then adds her in: "Raez."

Hetty lifts her glass in reply. Melissa finds the words and loads them onto her tongue with an effort and calls back, "Goodnight."

When he turns back to the door Hetty murmurs for Melissa to hear, "You'll get used to each other."

It feels like by now she needs to say something, so she says, "I hope so." She takes another drink. Some of the time, like her stint with the NID, she was truly awful to work with: impatient and critical and not aware of either until too late. Some of the time she overcorrected for that too hard and just didn't know how to argue back when arguing was what she needed to do. Sometimes, like SG-25, it was just because she wasn't plugged into the group gestalt as closely as she needed to be and the effects of that could be spectacularly bad. But maybe Hetty's OSP has enough room in its margins of error to accommodate her, which is Nell's theory.

"So," Hetty says. "Any questions yet?"

Of all of them, she'll make a small pile of the ones she's willing to actually ask. "Why a Serbian rifle?"

Hetty grunts softly. "Beginning in 1991, the Socialist Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia broke up in a series of ugly, ugly little wars. The sniper became an invaluable element in urban warfare. Under those circumstances, with such a high demand for performance, your rifle was produced as one of the best instruments in the world."

"I know. I watched news coverage of the siege of Sarajevo, actually," she cuts in, because this is all a little chilling. "Why something with such an ugly history?"

"Oh, all the weapons in this building have ugly histories, Miss Raez." Hetty turns to look at her, glasses glinting in the late golden sun. "If they did not bring them when they entered, they acquired them upon residence. We are instruments of peace here, but when war threatens us, we do not fear war." And she says it with such clarity, with such _calmness_ , that her ability to deal with that much blood is an unquestioned fact. It makes Melissa's breath seize in her stomach, until Hetty's own exhale lets her breathe again. "I acquired that prototype in 1993, when I participated in a task force to investigate the theft and trafficking of a number of weapons stockpiles from UN custody. The least we could do was reduce the number of guns in the fight. It was part of one of the shipments we recovered." She smiles thinly, looking down at her glass before meeting Melissa's eyes. "Our forces on the ground were commanded in part by then-Lieutenant Colonel Jack O'Neill."

Melissa breathes out again. She hadn't been willing to ask that question. There had been a sense that this was Hetty, and Hetty did details, so the details of a rifle dug out of storage just for her would count; but she hadn't yet assembled the leverage she'd thought necessary to pry an answer out of this woman. "And my father was one of them?"

Hetty inclines her head.

That's the little chain of where it started: Her father served under Jack; Jack's team opened the Stargate; Bruce Marsters came in after, went offworld and died, and bequeathed a legacy of war to a thirteen-year-old girl.   Give that girl a few years to grow up and she can get into _real_ trouble, the story she's been living lately, but this is long ago and far away. This is 1993, when she was nine years old. Living in Germany, waiting for her father to come home. Painting better than she should be able to, depending on your definition of "should", and so smart the world just hurt sometimes. Watching a television war that's frightening but also unreal, so incomprehensible it fascinates her. One of the last times she'd felt really secure and really like a _child_ ; they'd moved Stateside again in 1994 and the shock of middle school had ended a lot of things for her.

So of course Hetty took the rifle out. It's another piece of the war her father left her.

"As rifles go, it's nearly twenty years old," Hetty says, when Melissa's spent more than a little time with her eyes closed, holding her scotch. This isn't something she really wanted to share. "If you can find another model you'd prefer, you can requisition one."

She keeps her face steady as she draws in air and opens her eyes. "I don't know yet," she says, and decides to forgive her voice for sounding small. "I'll let you know. Thanks for the drink." She meets Hetty halfway by tossing back the last teaspoon of alcohol, and placing her glass in Hetty's outstretched hand.

"My pleasure," Hetty says. Before she's more than a few feet away, she turns back and gives Melissa the gimlet eye. "Get some sleep."

"Yes, Miss Lange," she replies, primly and glibly and respectfully and with sass. It's no more than what you should expect when you ply someone with spirits and dump ancient history on her head. Hetty turns away again and her retreating back shivers in laughter or irritation, or both.

*

Her specialty is not actually deep cover work. So far as NCIS is concerned, her training in subterfuge amounts to, "Keep your fucking mouth shut." She's not actually expected to have a cover the wind won't whistle through if you have access to government databases. Scratch the surface, and it's easy to see people like her are being paid a regular salary out of a holding company known to be a front for government payroll. After all: Anyone with access to that kind of information is on the side of the angels, right?

Uncle Jack helps her launder her payroll, partly because his DHS work gives him access to methods she doesn't even hear about in her three-day inservice on financial crime. She thinks that if her cover story were that she's a freelance, oh, a freelance carpenter, she wouldn't _mind_ seeing those fictitious payees listed under _Income - Freelance/Self Employed_. Actually, she thinks carpentry pays not half-bad. But her cover story is that she's a photographer; and in a previous life, Melissa Raez was another girl entirely, and _she_ did studio art. She knows what photographers earn. So she looks at her comfortable income and plump little invoices and total lack of a marketing scheme and thinks, _No fucking way._

Photography is a pretty perfect cover, though. It's one of those ubiquitous things, an unobserved observer; _I'm not being weird and looking at you, I'm just trying to photograph the sunset._ She makes business cards, a website, a portfolio online. Melissa Raez's photography focuses on landscapes, crowds, and architecture. She'd revisited everything she knew about the art, of course; secondhand photography guides, tabbed with Post-it notes, have been shoved to the back of the bottom of her downstairs bookcase, where a young professional would have shoved them after college and consulted with them infrequently since. And all of the pictures are hers. She'll give California this: It _does_ have absolutely fantastic light.

So of course she backstops herself with a couple actual freelance jobs during her non-Pendleton mornings. What, you thought she had anything better to do? She reads case files, she reads newspapers, she reads briefs; she can punch and kick and shoot. She still doesn't know a lot about the forensics part of the job, but she's _not_ a special agent and she's _not_ employed to investigate crime. She just protects the people who are. So when the office doesn't need her on those bright bustling mornings, she grabs her bag and heads out.

In every field of art there's a well of work that's boring and commercial, and the kind of thing you only do because it brings in the money. Painters turn into graphic designers turn their hands to sales brochures; so a young woman who moves to Los Angeles and needs to pay rent goes into...

Photographing real estate, as it turns out. It's the architecture that makes the connection. If she's going to photograph architecture she might as well know something about it, but a lot of the people who care about the intricacies of the Spanish Mission style aren't art aficianados as much as people who buy and sell houses. Real estate is a big business in L.A., and the bigger the business, the more likely a realtor is to hire a professional to take pictures for advertising materials. She meets most of them, ironically, in photography workshops, when they're trying to learn how to do the work themselves--and Melissa Raez is _very_ helpful when the newbie is struggling with exposure settings, then ready to provide her card after.

It's unbelievably useful to her job, and beneficial to her skills, to sometimes show up at an office and have someone throw a set of keys at her from across the room. From there, she has to locate the address on the label of the set, get to it, and gain access to and wander the house without getting the cops called on her. (Which: the cops are _survivable_. It had just been her first job in Beverley Hills, and honestly felt professionally embarrassing. A little personally upsetting, too; the first language they'd addressed her in when they assumed she was out of place was Spanish. She's learned how to look a little more upscale and makes sure not to attract attention these days.)

When she has a vaguely lifelike Internet footprint it gives her a little glow of satisfaction, even though at the same time she knows this is all _entirely_ superfluous.

Everyone needs a hobby, after all.


End file.
